The tent city referred to by some of its inhabitants as ‘OPP-Tent City’, and what i will refer to interchangable as a ghost dance camp, is situated in the peripheral of the Vancouver downtown eastside ghetto. A rupture from the same old tent city which has long been a political tactic by activists of vancouver starting from the 30’s, the site brings into being something new and unannounced. Having gone down there once or a few times a week since it went up months ago, and having spent time there over the last year; i will relay my limited insights by contrasting and finding affinities between this event and the ghost dances of the 1880’s. (Ghost Dance Religion: Mooney, 1896. And some say the ghost dance actually originated amongst the Sinixt indians of ‘BC’, The Prophet dance of the Northwest: Spier, 1979)

Like the ghost dance over a hundred years ago, the tent city began as a more polite performance by a few indians trying to reclaim space from the state. Similarly this action was immediately to be hijacked by more unruly indians, – or incorporated into the general economy of the ‘hang-around-the-fort-indian’. The political message in both cases ‘degenerated’ into the frenzy of the body and became expressible only by the intensity of life. Neither dance led their dancers to jump the reserve, or – in the case of tent city- the ghetto, but rather were an exodus to its peripheries. It was here, far from the centralized surveillance of the indian agents that the dance commenced. The tent city is surrounded by a newly remodeled ghetto of sophisticated interventions, a new form of regulating poverty by the direct regulating of life. This biopolitical experiment has provided supportive housing for the thousands of ‘junkies’ that prior to the 2010 olympics lived and died in the streets. The primary function of this mass-housing is to direct the flow of bodies and to administer a pharmacological solution to the mental-health-and-addictions-crisis, as declared by the police and state (VPD, 2013). These spaces where the state of emergency have become normalised into everyday life, have been referred to as ‘camps’, evoking the legacy of internment camps which has long been the norm of the oppressed (Agamben, 1995).

The fact that many of the 200 or so tents belong to peoples who have supportive rooms in these care facilities underlies the rejection of these places, or the need to escape them, if only while the weather is good. The ghost dances carried out by the indians back in the day were also performed outside of the government provided housing upon the reserve. By not leaving the reservation, but by setting up on their very limits, the collective-dances referred to as ghost dance camps, were conducted outside of control while still inside dominion. Similarly the tent city is situated outside the camp, but within the larger apparatus of the ghetto, and as a mass revocation should be considered intimate with the previous ghost dance camp.

Although protest encampments have become a recent phenomenon spanning empire, the ghost dance tent city shares almost nothing with these actions. One sketchy guy who i recognized from the Occupy that took place a couple years ago downtown at the Art Gallery, explained the most obvious reason the two are nothing alike, “like duh, cause this is down here!”. A quick perusal of the folks and the surroundings assure you that this is going down on the other side of the world. Nor has this much to do with the more recent Idle No More movement. Even if the tent-city is by far indians, there is practically no discourse emanating from the sea of shanty tents. The closest i heard of any native specific or pan-indian politics was, that “this protest is by the Six Nations in support of the Squamish people”. Interestingly the drunk guy who told me this, did so as i was giving him a photo of himself taken from a film i was helping with almost a year ago. In the picture he is sitting exactly where the main tent, with the ceremonial fire are. In the picture he is holding an invisible AK-47 and mimicking a firefight he claims to have been in at Oka in 1990. Prefigurative this image announces the Warrior Society flag that now waves at that exact spot now. The claim of having been at Oka is one i have heard from abucha indians (and is similar to the claim of having been a soldier in vietnam that many homeless men make: Bourgois, 2009). Although most times imaginary this claim is truly mythological and states more than the specific time and place – that they were in the war, and are a warrior. This guy though, covered in jailhouse tattoos, has a neck tattoo that spells Oka out over a dagger; he calls it his native necklace.

To find anything like a discourse, you gotta search the symbolic, like the shared mythologies and the shared rituals of everyday life. The most ritualized operation of the everyday life, both in tent city and the park as it was before it- is drinking. Rubbing alcohol being the cheapest is in much use amongst the most hard core drunks, welfare week being an exception. Several times as a gift i would make in exchange for hanging out, i was asked to get rubbing alcohol instead of beer or coolers, as natives would not be sold the rubby bottles whereas i could, being white. The carrying, mixing, sharing, and drinking of rubby are all moments of total ceremony, so that the drunken state that instantly follows takes on the appearance of an ancient rite or dance. In fact many of the commentators of the ghost dance tried to belittle it by claiming its dancers were under hypnotism and acting drunk. It is in the drunken trance that one is closest to visions.

At first the tent cities founders claimed that the site was drug and alcohol free, this proclamation repeated the first state of emergency declared in BC (1858), that no alcohol was allowed to indians. That law is long forgotten- and now the banner signs of prohibition make for walls in a shany pressed up against the baseball diamonds fence. A crew of younger drunks invite me into a cluster of tents sealed over by layers of tarps to make a brutally hot incubator that because of the sun through the blue plastic looks under the sea. They are very conscious of the long running divide between sober and drunk indians, “sober indians want us dead”, the one guy tells me with tears. In previous research at archives i had read the messages sent by indian chiefs to indian agents to ban the whiskey feast that had usurped the aristocratic potlatch (also; Alcohol and the Northwest Indians: Lemert, 1954). But making fun of the different divisions between indians these guy have scripted a series of poems or lyrics that play in jest off a youtube song called ‘How to know your a rez indian’; of course now changed to how to know your an urban indian, like the more tent-city specific: “when you wake up and the first thing you see- is a cop and a tree- you’re a tent-city indian’. The use of ritual, trance and song were the main functions of the ghost dance camp, and remain the same here. Whereas supportive housing banished any comradery in drinking, by some hipster administering medical alcohol throughout the day, in the park and the tent-city it is a party, like the outlawed whiskey feasts, a place “to drink with my brothers and sister”.

Contrary to the regimented tent-cities of the past, and the activist moderated encampments- the ghost dance tent city is of course- crazy, and can get pretty fuckin scary. Violence is normal, as is theft. Weapons are openly brandished and crack and meth-heads are constantly losing their shit. One guy who speaks much more truthfully then the Man, told me over the dimm of sorting out cans in his shopping cart, “no wonder the government doesn’t let them in anywhere, they’re all crazy … if i were in charge, i would kill them all; i would be terror.”

Recently front page headlines have announced a new kind of hysterics; replacing the moral outcry of homelessness is the panic that these new supportive housing buildings are out of control (Province, 11/8/13). It seems no matter what you do with these junkies there is no controlling them! Although the media, activists and politicians complain that there’s noone to talk to, they are the quickest to make demands on tent-citys behalf. Repeating ad nauseum the ramblings of a couple clowns who will perform for the cameras, the humanitarian discourse of social housing is put into operation. This is not to say folks don’t want ‘housing’, most of them are currently interned in supportive housing. The significance, or the non-signifying, is the lack of political discourse.

The absence of a political pronouncement is filled by the categorical demand of the junkie, who wants everything now. As a inversion of the Occupy slogan of ‘demand nothing, occupy everything’, the junkie demands everything, and who by the intensity of their non-being occupies nothing; a nowhere of the camp, and outside society. In this way we stand on the cliff of the abyss between reconciliation and rectification. If the primary operation of society is to reconcile social antagonisms into a pure functionality, then the negating force of rectification is to undo, and set right. This is the fundamental expression of the ghost dance, and though not necessarily believing in a messiah, the tent-city. Both echo the belief in the coming return to the old ways – which calls for the destruction of this world. No-one at the ghost dance camps and few from the tent city could imagine a freedom not free from white people, a return to indian life while the whites lived. The ghost dance camps and tent-city are situated much closer to the land of the dead then to the empire of the future. The dancers circulate in and out of death, they bring back the songs of their dead, and dance them back into the world of the living. In the tent city death is the closest to politics, a refusal of the biopolitical operations and the social psychosis that insists on life no matter what. By abolishing the threshold between life and death a new space for a new form of life is opened outside of the state.

Whereas society is totalizing, the social war is fragmentary and counter-power movements themselves are made up from multiple societies. Within these societies, that when in movement are struggling against the state, are hidden secret societies that excel in unstable conditions. Under the rule of social peace, these same anti-social forces are in permanent conspiracy, they exist outside the state as an antagonistic force of insurrectionary negation.

Of course many secret societies are not located outside the state let alone directed against it. Many operate as proto-states and organize as paramilitaries; others accumulate cultural capital and fossilize social norms. To distinguish between state-enabling societies that reproduces the means of domination, and secret societies against the state, we will start with a generic definition of secret societies and then seek out the antagonism:

1) Secret societies are voluntary associations;

2) Secret societies possess a body of knowledge not accessible outside (these are a protective shield against the outside society and a way of differentiating morally and politically the secret societies from outside society);

3) Secret societies are distinguished from other groups with secrets in that it is organized on the basis of its secrecy (outer wall of protection);

4) A secret society is a group of people who live or act together;

5) Secret societies are as dependent for their existence upon non-members as upon members; they cannot exist in a void.

The barricade is the myth of insurrection. To look back at past revolt is to reflect on the use of barricades. To see struggle today is to watch the burning barricades of the Paris banlieues, the walls of flame in Athens, the camp fires of the Native roadblock. A barricade consciousness was born in myth and spread as a symbol.

Anticipation of the future takes the form of those myths which enclose the strongest inclinations, which occur in the mind with the insistence of instincts in all circumstances of life; and which gives an aspect of complete reality in the hopes of immediate action.

The myth of the barricade is a body of images capable of invoking instinctively, all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of social rebellion.

As a symbol it has transmitted through centuries of defeat but still retains its redemptive agency. At the barricade, present struggles need not be overloaded with prior sufferings but leap back and grasp a past moment of insurrection, to give it new life and achieve today what once failed. It is within the potentiality carried in every moment that every insurgent barricade awaits its return.

From riot to insurrection the barricade is a constant. In the first awakening moments of the riot, the barricade appears immediately, made from dumpsters, torched cars, rubble, prison mattresses –whatever is at hand. Often the style of the barricade projects the trajectory of the riot.

Barricades of adaptation and diffusion can be instantly reproduced, even when decades have eclipsed since their last appearance. They are a template to enable, with minimal discourse or organizational continuity, coordinated points of rupture. These elements constitute the barricade consciousness.

Insurgent-Assemblage:

The barricade made of single objects working in cooperation with one another operates as an assemblage. The characteristics of the barricade-assemblage are the flowing, breaks and swerves of its autonomous components. This is opposed to the closed connections of the state apparatus that regulates networks of power. The barricade assemblage corresponds to a tendency of permanent connection –it reaches outwards to establish an infinite plain of consistency. The barricade is a node of spreading revolt, communicating and connecting to other modes of struggle. It flows from one street (or forest road) to the next; when it is restricted, it goes underground and links up again in a rhizome. Finally the street engulfs the city, as on the land –the industrial ruins are re-wilded.

Following the Barricade Wars of 1848 which swept Europe, the streets of Paris and other major city’s where demolished and replaced with vast boulevards, so as to prevent the use of barricades in future combat. At this time even Blanqui called for an end of the insurgent barricade claiming that they where stupid and a waste of time as they prevented the free movement of insurgents. A short while later in 1871, in a great leap forward for the adaptability of barricade consciousness, the barricades of the Paris Commune traversed the street to occupy the whole city.

The barricade fighting that took place during the Commune was fought more from the windows above in the buildings connected to the barricades. The barricade became the tissue that interconnected the street to the fighter to all structures.

The insurgent with their projectile constitutes a war machine under the conditions of the barricade: functioning as a component part in conjunction with other parts. In this, the insurgent barricade rejects any closed-circuit specificities and instead opens itself to a pure means, which demands nothing and occupy’s everything. There the rebel-subjects integrated with the barricade, in both myth and structure –intermingle as singularities in becoming…whatever.

‘Elsewhere, behind the hastily improvised barricades erected and set alight by local kids in back streets they prepare to greet their daily enemy – the cops in their anti-riot vans – with a hail of bottles and stones…’ August 2011 Revolt: Anarchy in the UK

Solidarity Means Attack:

A barricade not only cuts across vast periods of time (appearing in the same place again), but also carries across vast distances (appearing at different places at the same time). As a mechanism of solidarity, it best represents that the best solidarity is to attack. Dealing with multiple barricades draws the state into many fronts and relieves one front for attracting the full blunt. During the ‘stand off’ at Oka there where dozens of barricades across turtle island, with British Columbia (BC) erecting the most. This was the basis of the sentiment of Mohawk indigenous warrior Donna Goodleaf:

‘No doubt, their tactic of blockading railway lines proved to be a necessary and effective tactic of resistance to ensure that no military or state police would commit racial genocide against my people’.

The multitude of barricades which blossomed from the Oka uprising and that spring-up spontaneously across vast areas during times of crisis, offer not simply maps of revolt, but a cartography revealing lines of flight from empire.

A Beautiful Storm:

‘Blockades, being scattered are very disruptive and hard to regulate. When several are in place at he same time, the effect can be striking. As one is resolved, another emerges; much as do the forest fires that flare up across the BC interior as the summer storms sweep across the mountains.’

The barricade, as signifier of ruin, is the mystical expression of the catastrophic storm. The fire storm burns out a patch in the forest and opens it to sunlight; in this place grows now a diversity of new life. The storm creates spatial heterogeneity as the disturbances are spread across the land forming pockets of patchiness –each space is a point of succession. This dynamic explodes any equilibrium and in turn initiates new becomings.

‘The beautiful storm has come; but not yet the beautiful destruction’

In the wake of the beautiful storm the barricades grow, what is left is to Make Total Destroy.

Counter-Power:

Barricades are born not only from spontaneity but are also a common mechanism in establishing and maintaining counter-power. In extracting their needs from the state, insurgents will threaten with the specter of the barricade to haunt capital into negotiating, or will construct the barricade to force the state to sue for peace. This barricade piracy is a constant in parts of Argentina. A social force known as the Piqueteros (the term reference to their tactic of road blocks), has been barricading highways since the mid-90’s; demanding jobs, healthcare, money, ect.

‘We see the way capitalism operates is through the circulation of goods. Obstructing the highways is the way to hurt capitalists the most. Therefore we who have nothing, our way to make them pay the cost, and show them that we will not give up and die for their ambitions, is to create difficulties by obstructing large routes of distribution.’

In Argentina at points of crisis, the militant practice of the piqueteros has generalized across society, with the barricade becoming the manifestation of the categorical demand.

Blockade Everywhere:

If the barricade is the blocking of capital and command then the blockade is the threshold from where those relations to capital and command are severed and wither away. It is the zone of transformation, passage and flight; the blockade is life lived behind the barricades; it is the abolition of domination in our every day life.

In the reversal of traditional military statecraft –the logic of blockading a hostile enemy –the insurgent declares them selves to be hostile and in-turn violently resists the states interventions and commodity reification.

Whereas the barricade is constructed, the blockade is constitutive.

A re-territorialisation swirls beyond the blockade, placing its zone outside the state, and if the blockade exists in absolute antagonism against the state then the rebel-subjects find the greatest strength in the common-ing of life together. The insurgent singularities become a community so long as their power circulates and the blockade is that of a community-in-movement.

During indigenous blockades there is the assertion of sovern society against the state (that is when the blockade is not a ruse of the band council). The metropolitan blockade is an occupation of space –that’s subversion was understood at the disruptive climax of the global Occupy rupture (that is when the Occupy was not a ruse of activists). Keep ever green the memory of the Oakland Commune, how it was both an occupation-in-motion and a nomadic blockade: painted on the shields at the front of the mobile street barricade was the call, ‘Commune move in’ & ‘Cops move out’

Blockades find their consistency not just in the ability to maintain their barricades –but also in extending the blockade to include all aspects of life. From hunting to food gathering, ghosts dances to drum circles, armed defense to social rebellion, long houses to tent city’s, warrior societies to mutual aid societies.

The subject of the strike is no longer the working class as such, though workers are always involved. The strike no longer appears only as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from the workplace by those employed there, but as the blockade, suppression, (or even sabotage or destruction) of that workplace by proletarians who are alien to it and perhaps to wage-labor entirely. Blockading the Port is Only the First of Many Last Resorts: Oakland 2012

Sabotage:

To remain ungovernable the blockade intensifies its disruption by diffused sabotage. Sabotage must correspond with the everyday life lived in the blockade. In Eco-blockades the machinery of dominion is dismantled. In the metropolitan blockade the institutions of control are attacked. It was from Tahrir Square that every copshop, courthouse and government building in Cairo was ‘fired’.

The science of sabotage and the generalization of war-knowledge presuppose the centrifugal spread of revolt.

“We have blocked a major highway in Mexico State with a barricade made by the Luddites Against Domestication of Wild Nature. The fire lit up the dark night of peace and tranquility for those people who carry in large trucks ‘raw materials’ extracted directly from the earth. The chaos was again before the eyes of the police who arrived on the scene to put out the incendiary fiesta. We break their precious social order with our wild, insurgent and radical methods of struggle.”

Capture/Rupture:

In 1872 the first blockade in occupied BC occurred when the Gitxsan blockaded the Skeena River, preventing genocidal settlers from traveling. 100 years later was BC’s first armed blockade, on Bonaparte Reserve. The next year the Tl’azt’en blockaded a railway for 3 months. In the following few months there where at least 13 more blockades throughout the province.

The spread of barricade consciousness always follows logistical sense: ‘Part of the reason road and railway blockades are so commonly used by natives in BC is proximity; many reserves are located near or beside the roads, highways and/or rail lines –which are a common point of conflict as they are reserve lands expropriated by the government.’ In a chronology of such barricades in BC, put together by Zig-Zag, there where a total of 101 between 1984-2006.

Zig-Zag makes the distinction between grassroots direct action and the tactics of civil disobedience sanctioned by Band Councils:

‘ At times, roadblocks form part of a larger political and public relations campaign. Often the band and tribal councils sanction roadblocks. Because of their approach, or due to their relationship to the colonial governments and businesses, campaigns carried out under band councils tend to receive far less state repression’

But the power that the blockade represents can not be captured. Even such structured events signal the epoch of uncontrollability. Hear the fear of this becoming in a commentary written in the Vancouver Sun by a political science professor at the University of BC:

‘… But these blockades and arrests were carefully orchestrated; the RCMP worked closely with the natives. The natives wanted to get arrested to press their point. In those cases there was never a threat of violence, like there is on the Douglas Lake Road (’95). The use of masks is significant. That’s Oka…I deplore this development. This use of masks is a symbol we don’t want in BC’.

For the blockade to be insurrectionary it must explode collaboration. When used by collaborators more times then not it does explode in their faces. This lesson of fires nature to spread –which has led to the retreat from the woods by the Environmental NGO apparatus, is perfectly exemplified by the Elaho blockade of 2001. The environmentalists quickly lost their control to the black masked anarchist-horde, and as a result offered a bounty on the head of tree spikers and worked directly with the RCMP. This had no affect on the anarchists whose living-wild and subsequent use of barricades and consistent sabotage ended the logging of a massive corporation.

The blockade retains no inherent agency; an ethical tissue must grow from and intertwine throughout the community-in-motion. In Oaxaca during the Commune of 2006, which lasted 7 months and erected over 3000 barricades, the failure of the insurrection would not have been a given, if, as reported by Barucha Calamity Peller,

‘the sexual division of labor was openly confronted and did not disable women’s ability to hold the barricades and occupations.’

The insurgent blockade is the line of demarcation in this global civil war that cuts through us all. Before one can choose what side of the barricade they are on, they must determine which sides the blockade opposes with enmity.

‘…However, the Oaxaca Commune and its barricades and occupations, its street battles and long nights of assemblies, all running on the blood and sweat of women’s resistance, continues to inspire the possibility of insurrection and mass popular revolt. The state of ‘ungovernability’ which the movement claimed was meant as true freedom, and the rebellious women of the movement refused, for a time with great force, to be governed by state authority, by the domination of capitalism in its everyday manifestations, by husbands, middle class women, or by the police.’

> > >

Any closing remark fails us, as the urgency remains in the streets and in the wild spaces. As the potential for new blockades increase, so does our joyful anticipation for the meeting of new friends behind the barricades.

Even behind the walls of the city we can hear the war in the woods. A growing resistance to the pipelines of Empire –and a rejection of this civilization in crisis. “The largest mobilization in history of indigenous peoples of the north” (Zig-Zag) has drastically destabilized efforts to secure the pipelines. There is no doubt that as resistance escalates –Empire, that is globally running on fumes, will retaliate. We also know that in this war –the best solidarity is to attack.

Movements happen in cycles; sometimes there is a rupture that unleashes a cyclone of struggle, but usually one movement cycles into the other. Sometimes these cycles are similar to previous movements. Not the same –not even close. But certain moments share commonalities that open the potential to extract power and knowledge –and like all moments, offer the chance for rupture. For us, this war in the woods that is spilling south, is our chance – and we are willing to take it.

From a constellation of forgotten movements we choose to remember the direct action camp of the Elaho. Not to put it at risk of becoming another ‘heritage moment’ for radical environmentalism –but for its consistency in wrecking havoc. There is much inspiration to be taken from this small crew of anarchists (or rather, as they referred to themselves- ‘a horde of sasquatch’), whom with limited resources in an isolated space committed excessive sabotage to decisive infrastructure.

Below is a reproduction of a zine published in 2001 by the Elaho Valley Anarchist Horde. Written in the haste of action it has found a new urgency, and as such we have decided to post these excerpts –for strategy and critique, thinking and for action.

The opening article conveys the spectrum of protest, from NGO’s, grassroots environmentalists, indigenous folks and anarchist. What is clear, through the complexities and contradictions of such unstable allies, is the anarchists uncompromising defense of wildness and militant solidarity with indigenoussovereignty. Following this longest article is a chronology of actions against ecocide in the Elaho Valley, then a fragment of an article written by one of the tree sitters during the Lava Creek Bridge barricade, and finally a couple communiqué’s.

Welcome to the Elaho

The Elaho valley is in the southern portion of the Pacific Northwest coastal temperate rain forest. Located three hours north of Vancouver the area has mostly been logged and much of it is in the process of tourist development. The Elaho is unceeded Squamish and Lil’wat territory, meaning no treaty has been signed by either nation for the alienation of these lands. Regardless the BC Government (itself a colonial fiction) calls this ‘crown’ land. During the 1950s the provincial government, as part of a bribery scandal in which the Minister responsible was jailed, handed out huge tracts of ‘crown’ land to logging corporations in the form of Tree farm Licenses (TFLs). The Elaho, Simms and Squamish valleys make up TFL 38. These licenses are long term property transfers that transfer native land to the queen, then to the provincial government, and finally into the hands of the forest companies. The idea of the TFLs is as far removed from a vibrant ecosystem as possible. These are plantations complete with monoculture planting, toxic fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. A complex ecosystem reduced to a hegemonic industrial model, just as colonization attempted to reduce native cultures to mere shadows through the reserve and residential school systems. In BC genocide and ecocide are inseparable phenomena.

International Forest Products (Interfor) are the company that holds tenure in TFL 38. Interfor is a Vancouver based forest company begun in the 1970s. As late comers to BC’s forest industry they picked up a number of the most contentious and risky licenses; including the Elaho, areas around Clayoquot Sound, and mid-coast areas known as the Great Bear Rainforest. This company has long been known for its shoddy logging practices, and this in an area with the largest clear-cuts in the world. Violations and a small degree of public censure have done little to stop this and when pushed the company has been known to resort to violent thuggery. (see event timeline for information on the attack of Sept 15, 1999, or the video Hoods in the Woods) the main shareholders of Interfor are the Sauder family. William, the family patriarch is also the chancellor of the University of British Colombia. That this institution also turns out the province’s professional foresters should come as no surprise. The Sauder’s live in the Vancouver neighborhood of Shaughnassy, so if you’re in the area stop in and let’em know what you think.

Industrial forestry is one of the largest ecological problems in this part of the world. By viewing the world through economic models the viability of full ecosystems is ignored, while cubic meter after cubic meter is pulled off the land and roads rush in to fragment the old growth. Community tenures are being envisioned in many parts of the province. Run on an ecosystem and cooperative basis, new models of community control connection with the land are being opened. As can be expected the government, logging companies, and wise-use groups are fighting hard to stop this grassroots phenomena. In the Elaho area, workers have been scared into class-unconsciousness through industry scare tactics and PR which sets the interests of forestry workers against those of native and anti-globalization activists. The town council in Squamish (the nearest town) has gone all out in support of Interfor, to the point of declaring Squamish a “Protest free-zone” and demanding that local business stop serving anyone who looks like a “protester.” The unions are also of little help, in this province where the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) were outlawed in 1917, the timber unions have been firmly in the pockets of industry for over eighty years. The capitalist logic of grow-or-die has taken over the backwoods converting landscapes to assembly lines and peoples into mere cogs.

These macro-economic and geopolitical issues also have far-reaching impact on each individual component of the forest. From the microorganisms through the large predators all life is disrupted. In old growth ecosystems an average of over a hundred and fifty mycorrhizal fungi are present while in the replanted area an average of seven are to be found. This alone should cause us to stop and rethink. On the macro level the Elaho is the front line of Grizzly Bear habitat. Pre-industrial development, grizzlies ranged all the way south to the Baja. In 2001 the Elaho is the most southern point they roam on the coast. Salmon, black bears, lynx, spotted owls, northern goshawks, and wolverines also find a home in these woods while being pushed out of their more traditional territory. These wild animal nations are dependent on large unfragmented tracts of forest, and increasingly rare thing today.

Plant communities are also affected by industrial forestry. The plants in the old growth areas rely on these ecosystems to survive, simplified structures like those found in replanted areas cannot provide a suitable environment for them to thrive. Many of the plants also have deep ties with the native cultures of the area. Medicines, food, clothing, and building materials… a non-destructive use of these plants has gone on and still is.

Over the last few years the Elaho valley has come to stand for more then itself. It is one of the front lines in the struggle against ecocide in western klanada with numerous groups working for its protection. The diversity of tactics used has shown a creative movement with a deeper bag of tricks than anyone expected. Since 1977 there have been waves of protest in the valley itself (see chronology for breakdown). The first actions that year involved people locked into concrete barriers across the road. When Interfor employees arrived violence ensued with gasoline being poured almost up to the locked down blockades then set alight, support people were also roughed up. The loggers responded with their own blockade closing the access road into the valley and refusing lo let anyone who looked like an environmentalist pass.

In 1999 there were numerous actions including tree-sits and people standing in the road. These actions were met with threats of violence and arrests. These accumulated in a violent attack on September 15 1999, when 80-100 Interfor employees came to the camp demanding people leave. When the folks in the camp refused, they were attacked with three people being hospitalized. Women were threatened with rape. Videos and still cameras where destroyed, along with the rest of the camp and people’s possessions. They also started to cut the tree that the tree sitter was occupying, and tried to fall tress on to him. But people didn’t back down after the attack, there were more tree-sits that fall and numerous arrests made by the RCMP (always quick to company complaints, flying in with helicopters multiple times a day).

In 2000 there were numerous actions both above ground and below ground. The year started with a press release from the Lorax claiming the spiking of hundreds of trees in two cut blocks. The first civil disobedience action happened on May 15 when Betty and Susan blocked the road at Mile 20. This action was in protest to the timber companie’s continued use of carcinogenic and estrogenic chemicals in the forest. These toxins contaminate ecosystems worldwide and their effects are most prevalent in women. The first tripod seen in the Elaho went up June 5, at Mile 38 fronted with slash piles and barbed wire. The police used three helicopters and pigs on foot to chase the ground support away from the scene and threatened to take the sitter down using an excavator causing him to descend fearing for his safety. On July 25 a technical tree-sit/road blockade began on Lava Creek bridge (see Artemis write-up). Police used dogs, tactical units in full camouflage with assault rifles, and climbing teams (where did they learn to climb?) in their attempt to force the sitters down. After nine days the four sitters came down and were arrested. On August 28 the Horde threw up a tripod reinforced with an n=angled steel lockbox at Mile 38. The police swept the area and arrested three people for talking to the media from a van in a quarry up the road, and twelve campers who were drinking tea. They again forced the sitter to come down by bumping the excavator driven by an Interfor employee identified as one of the attackers from the previous year. As a finale to the year, a tripod went up the morning of October 23. A security patrol stumbled onto the action before the pod went up. Throughout this period there were also numerous acts of sabotage ranging from road spiking through machinery being wrenched. As this goes to print no one has been arrested in relation to sabotage in the Elaho (ed. Note: and no one would be!)

The more radical elements of the Elaho struggle have served to push the accepted discourses in the movement into directions no one has expected. Expropriating corporate land and ending the tenure system doesn’t seem that radical anymore. Compensation for lands returned to first nations communities isn’t an option anymore; suddenly reparations for the damages done are being discussed. Some liberal groups are still calling for provincial parks, but the stands made at Stony Point in Ontario and Cheam near Chilliwack are giving cause to rethink. In the first case native people reoccupied a provincial park, which had been stolen from them during WW2. During the reoccupation, the Ontario Provincial Police assassinated Dudley George. At Cheam the BC Government is also trying to further the land thief with the creation of a provincial park. In response members of the Cheam nation have set up barricades in protest. This has led people to rethink what it means to stop industrial development in the valley. Thank you to those brave people for their commitment and example. The communities in struggle in the Elaho have also become something more then just protests but experiments in what it means to live and work together without bosses or government control. The struggle has come to be far more than another battle to save forests; it is a site of continued battle against colonialism, capitalism, the state, and globalization. Maybe the media are right and there is a ‘war in the woods’, but they don’t realize just how big that war is.

Resistance to Ecocide:

Disclaimer:

The following text has been supplied by the multinational scum-sucking parasites at Interfor. Words pertaining to vandalism would be best referred to as forms of creative artistic reconstruction in the passion of rage. All work stoppages are because of people’s fierce determination regardless of what is noted otherwise.

Lave Creek Illegal Actions 1999-2000

1999

August 09 protest camp established. Tree sitter. Work shut down.

August 10 tree sitter. Shut down for fire hazard.

August 11 camp around drill rig. Three tree sitters.

August 12 court order read. Camp moved to south side of lava creek. Shit down for fire hazard

November 28 25 new mileage markers removed over 24-mile stretch of road.

November 30 Elaho Earth First! Claim sabotage to generator; generator not working and believed to be tampering (material put into crankcase)

Press release they plan more sabotage.

{Excepts from} Artemis Tree Sit

On the morning of July 25, 2000 Interfor was granted a new injunction against protesters and the Elaho-1000 road was blocked at mile 65. The barricade sat on the Lava Creek Bridge over a hundred feet above the rapids along the base of the canyon. Walking up the bridge, the road is covered with logs and rocks for almost a km, one seeks a road ending its life as a road. Signs line the sides of the bridge, framing the view of an old brown truck buried in logs and barbed wire. Through he truck runs a thirty-six foot steel pipe, ends reaching far off the sides. Running through the pipe are three thin prussic cords. These lines fly up a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet into a tree on either side of the road at the bridges north end. Up in the trees, tarps and platforms are visible. The southern platforms hang, like the plates of a scale, on the prussic lines which have been looped over pieces of webbing strung between two branches.

Each tree (Artemis and Ashika) holds two sitters and is connected to brad areas of the forest, and each other, via traverse lines. In the deep woods and canyon floor, are support crews ducking the police lines. While on the south end of the bridge is the camp and large crews of supporters. The morning of the 25th security wakes up to find the sudden chaos on the road. A lesson on why we win; never sleep, never forget.

Communiqués

Communiqué from the Lorax

Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2000

The Lorax today took responsibility for spiking hundreds of ancient trees in the Elaho Valley, in areas approved for clear-cut logging this year. The purpose of the tree spiking is to protect grizzly bear habitat and to deter International Forest Products from clear-cutting this ancient coastal rainforest, located on Native land northwest of Whistler, BC. Hundreds of black bears and a small number of grizzlies inhabit the rugged mountains and canyons near the Elaho River.

No one is likely to be injured as a result of the spikes. If Interfor decides to carry out its clear-cut plans, workers will have to find the spikes with metal detectors and remove them by hand. Most sawmills screen logs for foreign objects that may damage the saw.

The Lorax encourages wood buyers worldwide to boycott InterFor. The company is destroying a unique cedar, hemlock and Douglas fir forest that is thousands of years old, without regard for wildlife, water quality or Native land claims. The Elaho River area is the southernmost remnant of grizzly bear habitat on the west coast of North America.

Five and ten-inch spikes were driven into trees north of Mile 63 on the Elaho main and Elaho main West logging roads. An area north of Cessna Creek, and proposed roadways, were spiked along with the following cut blocks: 101-9, 101-52, 101-52A, 102-52B, 102-54, 102-55.

—end—

The Monkey Wrench gang Claims Sabotage in the Elaho Valley

An underground group known only as the Monkey Wrench Gang is claiming a recent act of sabotage in the Elaho Valley. George Hayduke, the group’s media liaison, says the gang recently crippled a giant generator owned by International Forest Products by pouring abrasives into the machines crankcase while it was running. “Sabotage is easy”, says Hayduke, “all you need is determination and a little grit”. Interfor, a Vancouver based corporation, holds the permit to log the upper Elaho Valley, an area of untouched ancient forest that includes the rare Elaho Giants, some of the oldest Douglas Firs in the world. The embattled logging company has provoked blockades, tree-spiking and worldwide boycotts because of its destructive practices. “Lets be clear about one thing, we are not the ‘peaceful protesters’”, Hayduke says, “standing on logging roads, climbing trees and waving signs is great. But this game is for keeps. We’re not going to hurt anyone, but we’re going to stop those goddamn machines’.

a intro of sorts, outlining the insurrection prior to my arrival can be read from this sites, side page: ‘Chronology of Intifada’

march 2011.

In the breaking morning, the Bourguiba boulevard in central Tunisia is silenced and pink. The silver razor wire coils the buildings, fortressed behind anti-riot gates, where the soldiers smoke, leaning against the tanks – a civil war inertia. The steel shutters are bombarded with graffiti, among the Arabic – ‘libre’. The advertising booths have systematically been smashed out by rioters, around the edges sharp fragments of glass remain, framing the relation of power. A beautiful storm has come.
—

What kind of revolution is this, what other kinds of revolution can exist but the transfer of power? Here the ministries remain in the rubble of their former glory, symbolically trying to institutionalize the crisis. Don’t look for the transfer of power in these razor wire barricades; in this rupture, power transversed these brick manors and constituted itself as counterpower – a rearrangement of the balance of power; through the potentiality (potentia) of the multitude – a counter power that does not constitute itself in institutions, but de-stituent’s institutions, ebbing the power of state out into the streets, hurling rocks at concessions – the emergent potentia grows more radiantly into a new reality. Upon the high school entrance, which is positioned beside the government square so that the smoke pit is literally in the centre of the action, greets all who enter with the lesson won by the youth – A.C.A.B. (All Cops Are Bastards).
—

The break from power took infinite manifestations; one materialization of popular force was the ransacking of the elites homes, offices, cars – the literal looting of dominion translates naturally into a desire to empty all institutions of their worth. It is clear these targets had long been marked; waiting only for the social detonation.

—

I did doubt – but no longer, the truth that the revolutionary suicide of the street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, ignited the revolt. I see now an army of street vendors, I see them by the thousands, the slum children all grown up, charismatically soliciting from between heaping tables and carts, each massive and young – selling the black market in claps and chants, hawking imitation brand cigarettes, knock off perfumes, fake designer jeans; I see now how they would have converged and stormed the streets uniformed in their trademark black leather jackets, shoulder to shoulder by the thousands – a strike, a wildcat strike of precarious workers – striking at the flabby bourgeoisie who run the white market. A precariousness not of the margin, but as the nucleus of a common existence that’s peripherality has now consumed the centre. Not a weakness – but a power; born of the street. A popular power now of the streets – ignited by the most extreme trajectory of human strike. I can see how instantly it must have leaped; from stand to stand they rose and brought everyone with them.

—

The cop shop slumps: burnt out and smashed up; the jaws of power have had its teeth kicked in – shards of which are still being swept up by a legion of old men with broken brooms. Wrung in razor wire and tanks – an exquisite failure in projecting command. Many who pass smile; the young gesture to each other their deeds in throwing motions. Once the monopoly of violence has been shattered, the force of the state is just an image they attempt to reproduce. The power of the street is not held by a static show of force, such displays only affirm what the street already knows. It can rupture at any corner, engulf any street and spread down all the boulevards. The power that simmered under the ash will not be doused – the ash has been blown away; and as the flame now flickers, it can spontaneously combust. That is why parked on most streets sit vans and tanks of pigs – as if they could extinguish what is burning the world down.
—

Abdallah Guech Alley is the self-proclaimed red light district. A week ago it was besieged by a mob of chauvinistic Islamists chanting, ‘No prostitution in a Muslim country.’ Their demands where rained upon by a torrent of projectiles and insults from the women at windows above them. Finally forced out, the neighbourhood reasserted its autonomy in a new political reality; not defending itself as a zone of sex trade – although concisely choosing to remain as such, but asserting community self defense – so as to collectively make such decisions. It is not just hopeful but practical that other such communities of the medina do the same, constructing a loosely weaved affinity of the kashba , grounded in autonomy. Only the social war will flush this out.

entrance to alley now defended by community

—

In front of the shops a fight with sticks break out; the men are clearly aligned in two groups against one another. I duck just as a guy dressed for banking, gets bashed into a parked car. The bourgeoisie – that is who these guys represent in their distinguished outfits, are becoming the realization of themselves. Aside from sectarian strife, they are flush with the euphoria of parliament victory. The state moves in the direction of reforms, so insisted by the middle class; they speak and are heard; but in their hysterics they abandon the power that brought them the privilege to transmit capital themselves, no longer subservient to authoritarian nepotism, the disincluded have been recast adrift, as if they would vanish into the horizon. But they have not; they are everywhere and hear nothing. When the bourgeoisie speak to power it is in a language they share, one crafted by the exclusion of the poor: the disincluded have no words to bargain with command and cannot hear the condolences of the middle class; they are left with the street to mediate their revolt, and as they demand nothing they speak with violence. As desperately as spectacle tried to reify the insurrection into the discourse of pacifism – it was not Facebook by which the poor communicated, but by the smoke signals of burning barricades and inflamed buildings– the communication of destruction. It is this violence, and not the violence committed over splitting the spoils, that the bourgeoisie will succumb – that or begin building terms of communication that are acceptable to the emergent disincluded.

—

And what of the sites of revolt. I have touristed the locations that were beamed across the spectacle: the boulevard and the government squares; I will here position them together, distinct from the sites I have come now to investigate: the vendor’s square and the red light district. The boulevard and government square are both colonial centers made to celebrate and solidify French power; that the mass mobilizations took place here was pragmatic for their size and political in their targets. Both locations are now occupied by the military and encased in razor wire. Along the boulevard, the children of the bourgeoisie shop; in front the government compounds; where once a protest city inhabited by the thousands who poured in from the country side in a liberation caravan, remains only at times, petitioners of the state – political cadres and destitute peasants seeking restitution. Both these sites following the mass uprising are continuously attacked in spontaneous riots that shatter the encroaching peace.

The insurgents are not of those places; but located in a peripheral forcing itself upon the centre. The vendor square has expanded and taken the whole courtyard of the train station and surrounding streets; their territorial appropriation is marked by black stains of flames that torched the building, inside all glass is smashed and graffiti saturates. The hustling of black market commodities necessitates the capture of territory and such illegalism operating as a norm in turn creates a different function of commerce. That the uprising ruptured from this site, and others like it, one can surmise that these precarious workers are of a variant political reality then that inhabited by criminal middlemen. This situation, which was the ultimate site of intervention, permeates with a revolutionary thinking and action – one that outthinks capitalism and attacks it. From this situation and potentiality, the immanent capacity of life itself is unleashed; a power unfixed and not of capital; but produced by social relations and transversive of the state and consisting of a counterpower that is able to hold its own and expand territorially. It is a warmachine.

Similar but different is the red light alley. Similar in it is cheating capital at its own game – by inverting the commodity fetish; but different to the roaming vendors in its fixed location. The transference from stroll to barracks is one of multiple dual relations. Having now to defend itself from Islamists, the stroll has erected barricades and gated the front of the alley with large metal doors adorned with defensive shards of glass. But the gate swings freely open and I stroll awkwardly through; each women steps out from the doorway, each room uniformly the same; here there are no pimps and no cops; their methods of harm reduction are visible. I am heartbroken thinking of the massacre of lives back home; how different women’s survival in the sex trade would be if anything like this was created and defended.

These are singular situations of resistance; situations where autonomous forms of existence can both attack the state and spread through society; there is a infinite amount of such realities being produced; and each reinforcing one another; it is such a wildfire that will outlast the revolution.
—

One of the most grotesque scams of the upcoming elections was made clear to me by a new friend who organizes with Essalem (women’s hands), a collective of mutual aid and solidarity, a self-governing group of women from all over Tunisia. She told me that although she never voted under the dictatorship, she believes it is necessary now, so as to deprive the Islamists. But using one’s vote as a tool in the social war tightens the bolts of the state. As popular democracy asserts itself, this contradiction seems less as such, and more the nature of the beast.

—

Sharing commonalities to the current intifadas, in that both are chain reaction conductors, are the European revolts of the nineteenth century. Marx, who was at that time an agent in the secret society, League of the Just (prior to denouncing the Blanquists for their secret society and their ‘mystifications of barricades’), had chance to comment: seeing these revolts as bourgeoisie revolutions and believing that to be the natural-state-of-things; he advocated that the proletariat maintain their vengeance in the streets and that the workers’ parties take advantage of this turmoil to destabilize the new government all the more with revolutionary demands; failing to deliver, the workers’ parties would advance and seize the power the bourgeoisie could not hold. Lenin picks up this thread spun by his icon; he too prophesies the petty bourgeoisie utopia that follows the revolution; keeping in lockstep, he advances the submission of the armed proletariat to the vanguard party; as it is ‘an anarchist dream that people could act concisely on their own.’

All this aside, he brings forward the crucial imperative: the smashing of the state by the armed proletariat and its withering away as a unifying totality. Understanding this historical failure of ‘perfecting the machine instead of smashing it’ is obviously not enough for the Marxist traditionalists. In a letter to a Tunisian friend, Antonio Negri – the emissary of empire, gargles the Leninist bile in calling for new institutions to replace the old; these of course are to be controlled by new bureaucrats and civil servants. He does not address how these ‘insurrectionary institutions’ would assist the withering away of the state as opposed to its obvious perfecting. The redistribution of power throughout the apparatus of state is only that. What we see happening outside the fantasia of the ideological-cadres is the total abandonment of the state. Following the insurrectionary smashing, the state in its irrelevance in daily life is left to wither; as arbitrator of relations it is torn asunder by new affinities that relate on common terms; a recommunalisation constituted upon mutual aid in a multitude of perennial modes.

This is the potentiality of the intifada, which itself translates to shaking off. The multitude is shaking off the state and leaving it in the gutter to wither away. As much to fear as the interim government, which seeks to make ‘the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible,’ is the real threat of the reconstitution of the state through postmodern institutions, which desire the ‘extension of insurrection in an institutional process that transforms the fabric of social being’ (Negri). Contrarily, the intifada is a process of collective decision making; through which, consciousness insurrection both smashes the state while dualistically, in the multitudes general abandonment of the states unifying forces, takes flight in the direction of its withering it away.

‘Ben Ali Sleeps Here’

—

Tunisia is in revolt, a mass social rupture. On the national scale, it is petty bourgeoisie in nature, as their interests are mediated by the state through the mechanism of superficial transformation: the interim government. At the same time, operating molecularly against the nation state, are the singular acts of revolt that create a nexus of insurrection, each specific to their horizons and all with their own dialect. Here in Mahidina, ancient and flanked by the sea – the moment of insurrection ruptured with the mass upheaval in the prison. Sensing the pitch of rebellion throughout the country, the inmates took the initiative and seized control of the prison. The riot left seventeen comrades dead before they could succeed in occupying the whole building and forcing the warden to open the gate. Over a thousand took flight.

I have pilgrimaged to this site and in retrospect my being apprehended by the anti-terror police seems obvious. Forcing me into their office within the prison, they made me erase my photos before doing an i.d check. From what I was joyfully able to observe, the prison was totally empty, only screws guarding other screws. A pile of burnt mattresses in the courtyard.

Having had to undergo the same questions from officials presiding over various agencies, I gained an appreciation for the fact that not only did the insurgents escape the confines of the prison, but they liberated each other from this apparatus of capture; one that institutes itself as an assemblage of controls, each conspired to rule ones bare life entirely. Here, like all other prison-societies, the inmate is ‘released’ into a quagmire of authoritarian voids. Remanded into a world of surveillances and bureaucratic internment; the inmate is subject to the mirror reality of inside and outside. Transversing these confines in insurrectionary flight sets fire to the prisons and their networks of power. To be free of the state is to escape its totality – total liberation obtained concisely through insurrectionary violence – it can happen in no other way.

Across Tunisia now successive escapes follow one another through the walls and over them; beyond the empty cells a new society is made from consistent evasion and harbouring. In most cases the prisoners liberate themselves, in others, the prison is laid siege from without, forcing the guards to withdraw – both situations made into concrete reality by the popular counterpower that detains the states forces in a fight for its own survival.

As I am shuffled from one screw escort to another screw, piled into a cruiser and delivered back to my hotel, as I exit I laugh in the face of the cop who requests only that now upon my safe return, I friend him on Facebook.

—

There is a notion that the intifada is about food, that the insurrection is a food riot. The ancient formula made by Lucan, the poet who wrote of Rome’s civil war that was fought on this shore, has been echoed since, ‘Revolutions are caused by hunger, and a government prepared to feed the easy-going masses can count on loyalty; starve the mob, and it grows reckless.’ Countering this mantra, Franz Fanon said on behalf of the Wretched of the Earth during the Algerian anti-colonial war, ‘Hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.’ But what if both notions are as limiting as all other attempts to categorize revolt into imperatives. What if the multitude desires bread and roses, and whatever the fuck else we so desire.

—

Deeper in the shit now. Brought here in a series of ‘louges’; aside from camels they are the nomads’ transport. In the final stretch, three such nomads are crammed beside me in this minivan. They are ‘from the south, where there is only sand’; we compete in looking out the window – they smell pleasantly of cigarettes and jasmine.

Sbeitla – the near centre of Tunisia. The countryside. This area saw the most intense fighting; the town is encircled by military but there are no police. This fact is repeated in celebration by three young insurgents who have taken me in as a friend. I’m shown the sites of their riots – the broken windows and signature black burns attest to their battles. The restaurants of the rich is in ruins. All over are mounds of ‘revolutionary garbage’ comprised of the barricades and charred derby of street fighting.

We sneak into a vast archeological wasteland, amongst the ruins of these empires, I am seated in a massive amphitheatre from the first century. The most jubilant of the three is an actor and takes the ancient stage. He performs a pantomime of a man visited by his elder and younger self. I believe he choose this skit, consciously or not, to reinforce what he had been telling me earlier: they are a new people now, but very close to history – the revolution has given them a future. The eternity he acts out now on this stage – and the insurrection he reenacted earlier, swim across the universe. Like the nomad there is no fixed position, but transcending lines of flight. Isabelle Eberhardt, a transgendered nomad who a hundred years ago made her way through this land, spoke of the chorus that accompanies this play before me: ‘for me, it seems that by advancing into unknown territories, I enter into my own life.’ These young guys are creating their new life out of a destroyed world.
—

‘On the first day we fight the policeman because he beat our girls and women. In the street we beat the policeman because he beat our mother, our father- so we beat the policeman so that he go out of our country. The majority of the people came out into the streets and beat policeman. And the military be with the people against the policeman. People came out and sing together against the policeman. The people love each other and are one against the policeman.

Here, in the country it happened first – then in Tunis. The cause of the revolution is because policemen beat a man who working in the street to buy everything for his family because he is poor. He finished education, but cant find job. So, this police beat this man. When he go to administration, the manager said, ‘you are poor – I will not see you,’ so he set fire to himself. Then explode all of Tunisia; the centre, the north, the south, all the world – explode.

Here in Kassirine the police kill fifty-five, sixty men and women. Here I show you a picture of a man who died in the revolution.

This happened over one month and fifteen days. For the first days we fight the police and then the military comes in and controls the police, so we stop fighting and control our houses in the night. Community control. The people take guns so to control. Revolutionary control.

We put forward our program; we take our ideas and write them and give them to the administration. We talk to each other and make a great program for the future. To have new culture. To change our lives. We like to change the constitution of our being.

We had violence in our school- a battle between the police and the pupils, because the police march into our school and punch the girls to punish. We have a girl out of school- the police beat her, so the boys come out and beat the policeman, because we have many girls who go to hospital.

We attack with molotovs and bricks; you can see it on facebook.

At first we are studying in class and we listen a noise of tear guns, so we go out to see a policeman who fights a girl, so we fight these police to go out of school. We beat the police; we punish him with our hands and the tables of the school, with chairs, with windows!

At six at night all people come out and with guns control the houses. We go to the government building and set it on fire, so the police cannot go. The tires of cars on fire to close the streets because the policeman cannot see when he take pictures. We are not afraid. Many fires, yes, many. Close the roads, block all the streets! We stayed there. When the policeman come, we fight him. When he can’t come- we go to him in violence. This went for a week.

We have a curfew; all people come out with their guns. We protect our homes. Fight police, and the mafia of Ben Ali- who have guns and snipers. We fight them, and give them to the military. We find eight cars; we stop them – full of mafia, many guns of Ben Ali. He can’t kill many people, because we have strategy. We have a program to control.

We do fire in the streets, we have guns and we do coffee and smoke cigarettes together; we have couscous – we cooking on fire. We have festival, very great!

local martyrs of intifada

—

A system of Order smashed. The shards edges slice in all directions. I try to get into Kassirine centre, site of the most extream violence in the country during the initial insurrection, but military and communard barricades stop me both at once. No non-resident is allowed entry. I’m told, the residents are sweeping out an infiltration of provocateurs. In the surrounding network of villages, every point is pressed. If the street is not barred by barbed wire then there is a human blockade on strike. Workers demanding back pay from bosses who have fled, engulf the city centre. Poor peasants demand free health services, immediately – they pound so at the gate. The unemployed circle the square, sitting and standing; speaking and silent- the many colors of their cloths are beautiful. At the high school the students walk out cause they don’t wanna do a test, they too fill the streets. A military helicopter blasts past overhead, momentarily overpowering the cry of songbirds that screech atop the echoing call to prayer. My head swirls dervishly. The ‘garbage of the revolution’ piled up into mounds of burnt wood and plastic reek. Only the ruins, crisp and golden – stand still. Behind them the countrysid bleeds out into the desert.

—

I return to Tunis to a battle between the police and street vendors. The police for the first time are on the outside of the wire and are chaperoned by the military, not the bored conscripts, but special forces – in black ski masks and heavily armed. Together they attack the many who are selling trinkets on the streets. With large wooden sticks the police smash the wares and bark at the terrified sellers. These streets are lined with the older poor and country poor, no match for the police who are themselves just warming up for bigger game. Realizing where their forces are heading to converge, I take off to beat them to the train station market square.

I make it before they arrive but I am met by a line of riot police who are forming a line to one side of the square. Then come the military from the opposite direction. The vendors who remain number just over a hundred or so and seeing how vastly outmatched they are becoming, they hurry their commerce into giant sacks and cardboard boxes. Finally the assault team is positioned, the leader bellowing orders through a megaphone. It begins to rain. Cops rush the square in teams and snatch specific people; other pigs smash tables into smithereens. A single teargas canister is fired into the far corner of the square. The gas is suppressed by the rain, only a small puff blows away. The military in line marches in lockstep. There is a rush, not panic, but fleeing from such force. I move with the mob, flanked on all sides by black leather. We rush through the adjourning bus terminal which is a large open space with slippery-as-hell tracks. Making it out onto the streets, boxes and carts too burdensome are thrown out onto the road as barricades. All around me is the smashing of storefront windows by vendors who determine those in need of a smash and those not, and residents and shopkeepers leaping into doorways. We move up the street, fast. The thick wall of cheap leather thinning out from around me. The vendors are dispersing down the serpentine side-alleys.

Between the vapor of tear gas and the marbro cigarettes, I’m breathing heavy. And the rain is fuckin freezing. As I’m about to abandon myself to being lost, I make out the boulevard ahead. Practically alone now, I speed walk forward. Arriving at the site of the mass demos, expecting to find it under occupation, instead to my great joy the boulevard is swarming with people, massed into great configurations, everyone extremely excited. It is a spontaneous open assembly. Hundreds of folk gesture wildly with their hands. Each cluster, numbering between a few to many are singularly posed in debate. I ping pong from one fractal to another. Although some are speaking in agitation, there is no hostility. The men lower their voices when the women speak – or make room in the centre for them to move in so that all might hear. The police are nowhere to be seen; neither are the vendors – though both are the subject of these forms. The rain stops and the sun cuts across our faces. I follow behind a group heading in the direction of my hotel. The sidewalks are stripped of the vendors that spilled over them. Night is coming. The street takes a deep breath.

military surrounds vendors

bank windows smashed out in vendors riot

mass open assembly

—

On the northern most tip of Tunisia, closest to Europe, is Bizerte, spearheading out into the Mediterranean Sea. From the ancient port, thousands, tens of thousands of young men and a few women take flight in boats that all too often capsize. Those who make it, now having taken advantage of a no longer functioning border police, traverse the violent waves to Italy, where like so many modern-day Hannibals they lay siege to Rome – threatening at the gates. This new Punic war has become vast. Legions from the south, no longer on elephant or under the flag of Carthage, storm the northern fortress states of Europe. The migrant. The nomad. Comes with nothing and demands everything. City slums are exploding with such rootless voyagers. The police actions meant to dislodge them result in riots and dispersion – and still more come and their desire strengthens in number. Centuries of colonial exploitation will be repaid, one way or another. Europe is weakening; wall after wall falls. The barbarians have no allegiance to any empire, and seek the destruction of all empire. Free movement, jobs and housing – the demands of the barbarians are joined by the ghetto dwellers who open their arms and invite them into their ranks.

From here, looking out onto the Mediterranean, now a ring of fire, the cheers of freedom are transmitted around the world, fanning the flames. Of course the fire did not start here – it grew out from under the earth, the land, the sea – the things that connect us all. The Tunisian front has previously been a bastion of revolt, which spread out. Following their anti-colonial struggles in the fifties, Tunisia was used as a base to stage operations in neighboring Algeria. Rebel radios, like today, blasted beams of revolt to the wretched of the earth. When Franz Fanon – doctor, theorist, rebel – died, his body was smuggled from Tunisia to Algeria. It is that spirit that represents violent struggle, which is being smuggled again out of here. Again, the wretched of the earth hear the songs and slogans of revolt, and again spontaneously rise as one, a multitude that is shaking off oppression once and for all.
—

The plane from Tunis to Cairo is filled almost entirely with Libyans fleeing Gaddafi forces. In the sanctuary of the cabin they unfurl dozens of rebel flags and their songs turn to weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. The man in front of me sobs in his seat. He tells me he will not live life as a refugee but will return to reclaim his country.

—Young dawn stretches her rose-red fingers out across the land of the lotus-eaters. The morning in Tahrir Square is hot already. The smell of the charred remains of the extinct government’s headquarters wafts through the stagnant heat. Dozens are here to protest the referendum tomorrow, which seeks to legitimize the military’s sham democracy. The small group grows in size with the rise of the satanic sun. Enthusiasm also rises, with young rebels showing up. They kick-start the rally – now a couple hundred. Chants from each and all: ‘Revolution Till We Win,’ ‘The Blood of the Dead Will Not Dry When You Vote,’ ‘Why Keep Silent, You Want Mubarak Back?’ In the centre of the expanding mob are the mothers of the martyrs, who cry out over and over, ‘Where are My Dead Son’s Rights?’

The motor of chanting and clapping has whipped the hundreds now, into frenzy; the dividers separating us from the road which circles the square are thrown down by young rowdies who begin covering their faces with their headscarfs. The people without hesitation serge out onto the busy street. The freshly returned police are quick to move in and nab three specific young men and attempt to hurry them away; this propels people deeper into the turnabout, charging after the cops. A vanguard of hoodlums arm themselves with sticks and what is left of the remaining cobble stones. I instinctively fall in with them as they swoop down on the pigs trying to engulf them. A straggling cop has his head caved in with sticks as his fleeing buddies are pelted with rocks. The comrades are easily dearrested and the square has been reoccupied now by a thousand at least. Jubilantly, barricades are built, by the young and old, workers and the poor, Muslim and Christian, men and women, and a life lived not so long ago in this site is brought back into existence.

In one part of the square – half of which is now totally occupied, a group of Muslims put down sheets of newspaper as prayer mats. A makeshift stage is constructed to prop up an amman who drowns on at length in a megaphone under the noon sun. From the surrounding side streets waves of folk exiting mosques flood in. The military makes moves to divide the protest, all advances fail as the girth of the crowd consume their lines; or in one case a massive tarp is unfurled over their helmets and is frantically jostled by dozens on all sides. Children cut between the troops mocking them with insults. Vendors set up shop amongst the throng, and the sun digs its nails deeper into my skull.

a swarm de-arrests comrads

Tahrir square re-re-re-occupied

—

Today’s referendum, which has been adorned by a public holiday, is a counter-insurgency attempt at territorializing the enmity directed at the state into codified forms of political representation – a representation reproduced to accommodate a risen state of political consciousness into a free range pasture. That the Canadian state is helping finance this ‘democracy building’ is no surprise. Empire scrambles to institutionalize the crisis growing in the wake of this escalating Global Civil War. New allegiances are formed to solidify ranks. Democracy is the name given to this war alliance.

The deterritorialisation of Tahrir Square is of utmost importance. The militant degree of communization that took place there near devoured the whole state apparatus. Not only in the blocks and attacks against capital and command, but in the existence and reproduction of autonomous life thriving in an expanding commune defined by its mutual aid. Across the country other such realities were created and began connecting with one another – not uniting in one body, but as localized reinforcements which had the military drawn and quartered across such vast regions. In the south, nomadic warriors destroyed the chain of military outposts and seized all the arms; it is inconceivable to believe they would trade them in for the freedom to vote – in a warlord for the northern metropolis. The industrial cities are still rocked by roving wildcat strikes that will not cease regardless of the outcome of the referendum. The liberated prisoners will not return to their demolished cells, and the police will never again be safe.

The partisan subjectivity of this intifada cannot be captured by the parliamentary apparatus – the rupture is too massive, the multitude ungovernable. The authority of state is burnt to the ground. In front the government building – a totally devastated and burnt out shell – an army guard sweeps at the tons of wreckage with a straw broom, his lone companion has his arm in a sling and is asleep. The aura of authority – that which is closest to heavens – is vanquished.

Only now with the imperial financing for the reconstruction of the institutions, is the state able to survive on life support. If these flows which allow the conspiracy of democracy were to be sabotaged by global direct action – and smashed states left to fend for themselves – their withering would be immediate. In our faliure of such duty, empire, through international intervention, takes on an imminence in society, the more so in revolutions fought for the sake of state. In so far that such a society is power, biopower and spectacle are the sublimation of power. Not so long ago Egypt transplanted concentrated spectacle with a diffuse spectaclelisation of society, the old ways took on new methods – integrating power through a mediation of law and institutions. Now, empire will attempt to generalise itself throughout society by norms and apparatuses. The difference is seen in operations. Whereas institutions regulate a panoptical society – norms cut through lives and organise them as forms-of-life. In the absence of dominant apparatuses, the destruction of institutions suffised in the smashing of state. The life forms created in this rupture are now the responsibility of empire to supress, and the counter-insurgence operation of choice is the spectacle of parlimentry democracy.
—

I spend the day cabbing to a few neighbourhoods of Cairo – seeking insight into the functioning of the referendum. It’s clear that all districts are severed from the centre, from which emanates the phlachuance of a lame military occupation – for it is there that sit the many upturned thrones of power. Choosing an area in the north, east, west and south, I spend only an hour or two in each – filling my blatter with tea and speaking with who will talk to me. There is resentment directed against me by many who are disgusted with the journalist vultures that circle the city. I comfort myself knowing I write for no boss. But still…

I’m told that the trees on the corners are painted to signify that ‘there is no government here’. No cops either, thought the military drives through today with their jeeps decked out in ‘Vote Yes’ propaganda. The trees are painted red, white and black – the Egyptian colours; this is not nationalistic but a sign of national consciousness. The fundamental difference is clear in the internationalist spirit which is manifest in Libyan rebel and Palestinian flags, which adorn many cafes. In the last few weeks there have been rallies in support of the Brahinan insurgents and against American imperialism and Zionist occupation. These secessionist communities are celebrating a renaissance of their unique peculiarities while in solidarity with the world. A constalation of Tahrir squares re-communised in a galaxy of communities.

These neighbourhoods are no longer fixed in their historical inertias and cultural delineates, but have become communities-in-movement. In their secession from the state they have a disposition towards the common, the dynamics of which are autonomy and cooperation. This social machine is war on the state-form: dispersion of power, plus social cooperation. The community brigades who continue in shifts to patrol their areas have no hierarchal structure, thus dispersing centralization and feeding cooperation. That the plural ‘hoods, outlined by residential alleys come into contact and share in the building – or recommunising, of the common, as nodes – not partitioned zones, maximizes the singular strength of multiple communities-in-movement.

Everywhere are ‘NO’ signs, but it is not made clear to me who made them. Many newly formed parties are against the referendum as they seek more time to develop their own beaurocratic structures. But, all but a few of those I had the pleasure to give a smoke and speak with are not voting at all. ‘Why vote, there will only be another revolution’, she tells me. In the revolution of everyday life, everyday is exceptional to rule. Wither totalitarian or democratic, it is the unifying function of the state, which these communities must escape. When the commodified people no longer want to exist as commodities and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic, a referendum for interim government is seen for the shadow play it is; and those who avert their gaze from such spectacle say, we don’t want ‘power’, we want the power to change all of life.
—

‘A time between ashes and roses is coming; when everything shall be extinguished, when everything will begin again.’ Throughout the rupture the Egyptian museum was attacked several times. Not only did looters expropriate some priceless junk, but the insurgents – in beautiful acts of primitive-revolt – smashed several of the artifacts that celebrated the decadence of domination. Such primal iconoclasm signifies much more then rage, it is a conscious attack against civilization.

Such actions are the cry for exodus, to abandon the site of slavery and exit the domain of control. By neither remaining subservient – nor engaging power upon its terrain, exodus explodes the either/or. Exodus fights a rearguard battle against the pursuing forces of the pharaoh, whilst moving away deeper into the desert – from which the coming community is founded. Exodus – in its primitive-revolt blasts apart the continuum of history and transfixes the moment of insurrection into an eternal present. By smashing the wreckage of civilization, which piles up around us to the sky, a line of flight is drawn and war machines placed upon it. The sarcophagus of state is demolished – the mummy elite dragged out into the light of a new dawn, and turn into dust. The hieroglyphs of the institutions, which guard command, in their spectacular complexities – turn a dead language, as new communications come into being. For this is exodus from totality.

The attack on the museum is inspired so. It tells us, ‘old gods die hard, but smash easy’! These signifiers of civilization are its scaffold, and as such need only to be pulled down to cave it all in. What is of value is looted and the rest abandoned. This is how the multitude, like a scarab beetle, will push the dunghill of civilization off the face of the planet.
—

I accidentally stumble into an artshow that is being put on for dignitaries of the European Union. Circling the cesspool of artists and grotesque politicians are highly stylized photos of the Tehrin Intifada. The scum suck down their kabobs and guzzle their booze. It’s hard to imagine much worse. I escape hoping the place will burn. Art is the mechanism that normalizes antagonisms into a commodity form. It captures the potential of a revolutionary culture and places it within the regulations of the bourgeoisie. Scrambling away down the nearest alley, I’m stopped for a light. Relived, I have a smoke with a guy and I quickly ask him about the uprising. His brother was killed. It took twenty-two days to find his body; in a morgue, mutilated and robbed. He now looks after his brother’s two children. He takes out his wallet and shows me their picture.

—

Holy fuck, I’m stoned. There is a full moon over the harbor of Alexandria and I’m awash in hash. Smoked in a café, which was the only free-ish spot before the intifada. I couldn’t take my eyes of those seated around the table. They all refer to themselves as ‘FrancoArabas’ – a term proudly invented for the young and rebellious bastard children of the metropolis. I didn’t have my tape recorder, so I retain only chunks.

The Egyptian revolution will forever be known to have been January 25th. But here, it was the 24th. On the day meant to celebrate the police. A month previous, a pig killed a student and so a protest was marked for the 24th, I’m told there was a Facebook page. In the lead up to that day, there were many scuffles with the police who were increasing nervous watching the fate of their colleagues in Tunisia. Finally comes the 24th and all hell breaks lose. Hand-to-hand combat quickly escalates into armed confrontation. ‘We fire all the police stations’ (save one) and over the next three days the government buildings, courthouses, ticket office – are all fired. Three million people took power into the streets; they construct mass encampments and create food and supply lines for this people’s army. The politicos parachute in and attempt to claim the intifada as their own. Most especially – the Muslim Brotherhood is despised by many for being collaborators with the regime. On site, the FrancoArabas agitate against their xenophobia, ‘We are all Muslim, Christian, Jew, gays – we are the people and the people make the revolution.’ The police are forced off the street and the army reluctantly sides with the popular counterpower.

The police have only just started seeping back in, in small numbers doing symbolic tasks – one such cop who killed, was himself beaten to death, stripped naked and left in the street. ‘they are scared now, before they beat us, now we kick over their motorcycles!’ none of the FrancoArabas voted; ‘we will wait and see’. ‘We fought to change the system, not the government.’ Shit, I heard so much more then this, but the hash has done me in, and now it’s the moon I cant take my eyes off.
—

On the outstretches of Cairo are two shatter zones which are refuge to many who have fled oppression in the south. Beside the City of the Living and the Dead – named so because in and amongst the tombs live twenty thousand families; is Garbage City – called so because one hundred thousand live in and amongst mountains of garbage, sorting, recycling and reusing. Garbage City symbolizes two ways this collapse of civilization is gonna go: easily put – Fascism or Egalitarianism.

A few weeks ago there was a massacre here. The repressive relationship between factions of Muslims and Christians exploded and led to the killings of many, shot in the heads and in the hearts, and the injuring of hundreds. The single event in a long history of blood vengeance was explained to me by a local. A love affair between a Christian man and a Muslim women led the Muslim father to beat his daughter almost to death. Having not killed her, he was in turn killed by his relatives. As this ‘feud’ continued, a group of Muslims broke off and attacked a Christian church, destroying it with hammers in front of the community. Following this – members of the community went to Cairo to protest the complicity of the police and military. At this time provocateurs spread the lie that Christians had burnt down the mosque and attacked Muslim women. This incited the massacre and targeted raping of the Christians of Garbage City.

There have been nightly attacks since. I’m shown bullet holes in homes and the sabotage of the water drains. I am introduced to men who were shot and young woman who were raped. Scores of people surround me with events being translated incompressibility. They believe I’m with somebody that will help them. The mother apologies to me when I have to suppress weeping while hearing the story of her raped daughter who has returned with a soda for me to drink.

Many Zabbaleen (literally, garbage collectors) went to Tahrir Square in revolt. I ask if they have faith in the revolution to bring justice. Each I ask, shrug and say it’s in the hands of god.

Barbarous religious warfare is escalating as cults like the Muslim Brotherhood appropriate space made by the intifada. There is no doubt, and in fact proven in many cases, that the military continues in operations that further entrench intolerance and violence. The Zabbaleen have long been subjected to discrimination and persecution. As refugees from the south they were abandoned to the city dump over a hundred years ago. They were able create an economy based on mutual aid and cooperation. This lasted in prosperity until recently when the state ordered the extermination of their pigs (used to eat compostable garbage) and then privatized garbage collecting, ending what has been unanimously declared as the world’s most efficient recycling system.

But still they persist. Showing up in fleets of trucks and donkey carts to steal the garbage before the corporate collectors show up. Back in their City, thousands of families form an assembly of sorting. Finally, garbage is pulped and turned into anything you can think of. Hundreds of gardens grow aplenty. Day cares and health clinics, schools and care homes all constructed by collective effort. If the intifada cannot defend garbage city by eliminating islamo-facism – conditions will quickly spiral into more massacres. And if the global intifada cannot reproduce the relationships that are lived here into an emergent universalism – it will all be in vain; for the encroaching collapse will usher in no future but planetary omnicide.—

The state of emergency, which for oppressed people is the norm, has been by force, by a beautiful storm – inverted, flipped inside out – so that those who once lived besieged by command, now lay siege to it. This real state of emergency where the balance of power shifts so exceptionally so as to create in its wake a whole new assemblage of relations is where counterpower begins to generalize itself into a new norm of the common. Perhaps nothing better marked this state of reversal then the popular stormings of the state secret security institutions, first in Alexandria – then Cairo, then throughout Egypt, until each was overrun, looted, confiscated, destroyed – how easily the most precious appendages of the state apparatus fall to the power of the street in the times of real emergency.

Once declared by the multitude, the real emergency – smashes the monopoly of violence held by the state and all actions of retribution are permissible. Not solely acts to avenge our histories – but also acts that redeem our futures by expanding counterpower deeper into the affairs of people. Old dependances which unified survival to the state are severed and wither, and under the real emergency new cooperations take their place: citizen fire brigades, neighbourhood defense committees, people getting out of their car to direct traffic. The system of bribery and nepotism that makes all states into mafias, is thrown into the dustbin.

But of course the power of counter-revolution is parasitic – it finds its dwellings in needs and fears. It invokes the threat of civil war, it points to Libya and promises the same – only votes, they hiss, can lead to calm and prosperity. Many will pour their hopes into the elections, which they know was won with their blood. But the system will not be able to return the investment. For to make such concessions that are being demanded would bankrupt the bourgeoisie as a class. But the bourgeoisie will find that the poor who delivered them to power are not genies who can be returned to their lanterns. Their expectations are gut wrenching. The classwar is so massive that single members of the bourgeoisie will have to sacrifice their gains to a military dictatorship, or betray their loyalties and return home to the multitude. It is in this real state of emergency that new subjectivities are created, becoming whatever they desire and choosing to live free. Such is the emergent potentiality of the blooming intifada.